The error message bothered me, and these numbers looked much lower than those in the thread, so I started poking around. I found Eric Anholt's DRI page extremely helpful. I learned DRI is the Direct Rendering Infrastructure, "a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner... The first major use for the DRI is to create fast OpenGL implementations." The DRI page for ATI, the maker of my Rage Mobility 128 card showed it was supported. However, using Eric's troubleshooting page, I failed to see DRM (the Direct Rendering Modules provided DRI) loaded by the kernel. Checking my /var/log/XFree86.log.0 file, I saw attempts to load DRI and DRM:

Clearly this was a problem. The first issue I decided to tackle was not seeing drm loaded by the kernel. My laptop runs FreeBSD 5.2 REL. I found a r128.ko kernel module in the /boot/kernel directory, so I tried loading it via kldload:

to my /boot/loader.conf file to enable this at boot time. Unfortunately, this did not solve my "Direct rendering disabled" problem. Thanks to this thread I added this to my /etc/X11/XF86Config next:

Section "DRI"
Mode 0666
EndSection

This was supposed to ensure that all users could use DRI, but it had no effect on my immediate problem. In the same helpful thread I learned I might be asking too much of my 2000-era graphics card. There might not be enough memory left to run DRI, so I made these changes to the /etc/X11/XF86Config file: